Continued from Weekend 1
print a new edition once a month. Later on, new printings would be issued once a week. The book sold millions of copies and was translated into dozens of languages. It was immediately canonised as a classic work of literature.
"Of course I was in shock. This was something that had occurred overnight. All of a sudden, I couldn't go out into the street (and since then I sit in restaurants with my back to the door, unlike cowboys in the movies). I came to the conclusion that I had to behave as if nothing had happened. I would do my work, telling myself that it was just one single book in the body of my creative works. This conclusion comforted me, because my readers expected another book like One Hundred Years of Solitude, to be published instantaneously. I would sit down to write and everything would come out the same. There was also a moral problem here, for if I had wanted to continue and write more Hundreds of Years of Solitude, they would have been a sham."
You are describing a state of being held prisoner.
"You're asking me what I did in order to liberate myself from One Hundred Years of Solitude. I had an old idea to write A Patriarch's Autumn but I did not know how to go about writing it. So I decided to find solutions to the problems with that book, solutions that may not have met the expectations of my readers but which fit in with my own point of view. The book was released and sold well. While many readers were greatly disappointed, I myself made no compromises. Today there is a large cadre of readers who actually prefer A Patriarch's Autumn over One Hundred Years of Solitude. I too prefer it but I am not a good judge. That book's success is not really something I think about. Rather, I remember the terror that had consumed me".
As a small child he suffered from poverty and his youth was spent without a lot of comforts. It was only when he was eight years old that he moved to the port of Sukra to live with his parents, inspiring the towns described in The Colonel has Nobody to Write to Him and Chronicle of a Death Foretold. He was sent for studies to the city of Barankia, where he was described as a skinny, introverted child. The children would laugh at the strange pupil who preferred not to take part in sports. His high school years were spent at a school near Bogota, arriving there after a long voyage on a Magdalena River steamboat (such as that described in Love in the Time of Cholera).
He decided to become a writer after returning for a visit to his birthplace, Aracataca, where he had come to bury the grandmother who had raised him. Beforehand he had even tried to complete reading for the law at the universities of Bogota and Cartagena. But, having despaired of the studies, he had sold encyclopedias in the northern Guajira Desert, returned to Bogota, lived in a low grade motel popular with prostitutes, and begun a career as a journalist.
When he received the Nobel Prize, he stood before a dilemma. He feared that the prize would paralyse him, just as it had numerous previous writers. "Not one writer has come back with a decent creative work after receiving the prize. And today I understand why they give it to very old candidates they've already finished their work." Today Garcia Mirquez can do whatever he wants to do. He has now completed after three years of work, conducting hundreds of meetings and interviews, deciphering 120 cassettes and poring over thousands of excerpts from newspapers and documents - writing a 700 page book that will be called News of One Kidnapping, about the kidnapping of nine journalists in Colombia at the beginning of the current decade.
In 1990, Pablo Escobar, the drug baron who in essence ruled over the lives of Colombians, was wanted by many, including the state itself. The authorities asked him to surrender but he set two conditions; that he would not be deported to the US and that his life would be secure, even in his place of imprisonment. As an additional bargaining chip, he kidnapped, from August 1990 until June 1991, nine journalists, including the daughter of the former president of Colombia and the editor in chief of the newspaper El Tiempo. It was on their backs that he waged his negotiations for turning himself in. Escobar's demands were met in full and he finally released the journalists. One was killed by accident in a shooting exchange.
"I wrote of that year," says Garcia Mirquez. "I imagined how life proceeded for each one of the kidnap victims; how life was for the families of the victims; I demonstrated how this situation affected the entire country. I wrote every day for three years. As far as I'm concerned, the story is even more incredible than any novel I've written. Unbelievable things happened there."
The work on that book awakened in him a strong desire to go back and write pure fantasy. "I thought of three short novellas, each of which would be like Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and they would be compiled within one book. I would write and publicise each of them as a single unit, and only afterwards would they be released within one volume. In an honest manner, with three titles appearing on the joint title page. I already have the three stories laid out in my head, as if they have already been written. I already know how they will develop, how long they will be, everything."
Once, during the 1970s he was asked what his favourite book was, and answered A Patriarch's Autumn. When he was asked the same question during the 1980s, he countered with Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Now, in the 1990s, when he is asked the same question, he replies that his favourite book is Love in the Time of Cholera. "That's my best; that's the book that was written from my gut," he simultaneously gestures with an open fist rising from the bottom of his stomach up to his heart.
And it still seems that Gabo's heart belongs to Mercedes Baracha. She was his love as a youth in Barranquilla and it was to her that he offered marriage at the age of 13. They married in March 1958. He mentions her in several of his books. Love in the Time of Cholera is dedicated "To Mercedes, of course". They have two sons, Rodrigo Garcia Baracha (36) and Gonzalo Garcia Baracha (34). There are also two granddaughters and a new grandson, three months old.
Garcia Mirquez reveals the nature of the relationship in the house. "I have been able to write all I have written because Mercedes bore the world on her shoulders. The telephone calls, the debts, the contacts, money - formerly because we didn't have any and later because we had a lot. When I get involved with something she tells me, `Mind your own business. The only thing that you have to do and know how to do is to write.'"